Perfect, Stories of the Impossible
A masterful collection of gripping, chilling, suspense short psychological stories
Published on 1. June 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
297 pages
978-1-7398645-0-7 (ISBN)
Description
In these stories of the impossible, master of the domestic thriller Sally Emerson introduces the eerie into her keen-eyed portraits of everyday life. A clerk working in a public register office begins to receive death certificates dated in the future, but can she alter fate and save the victims? A woman unable to have children discovers a way of cloning her husband, but is their cloned son destined to repeat the mistakes of his father? A suburban mother is prescribed health supplements with rather amorous side-effects; can she resist their sway and keep her hands off her neighbours? And who exactly are the tempestuous and dangerous warring couple who seem to have been alive forever?
Emerson's tales of quotidian life invaded by forces beyond our control are both beguiling and uncanny, and ultimately uplifting as she celebrates the tenuous gap between reality and unreality. Likened to Roald Dahl and Helen Dunmore, with a dash of Shirley Jackson, this is fiction at its finest, a rare blend of fantasy and the literary. Magical, humorous and unfailingly honest in its depiction of humanity, Perfect will stay with the reader long after leaving the twists and turns of its pages.
'So exquisitely drawn, Sally Emerson's stories are full of gripping twists and astute insights into emotional dilemmas. They're uncanny, and quite unlike anything else you'll read' JANE THYNNE
'Emerson's skill is to subvert the humdrum with sinister undercurrents' SUNDAY TIMES
'A writer who excels in portraying the darkness beneath polished surfaces' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
'Sally Emerson has a talent for terror of the best kind, she understands obsession and hints chillingly at evil' DAILY TELEGRAPH
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Mereo Books
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
359 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-7398645-0-7 (9781739864507)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sally Emerson is an award-winning novelist who is publishing 'Perfect, Stories of the Impossible', her first short story collection through Quadrant Books, in June 2022. In the stories everything seems ordinary enough until something extraordinary begins to happen and takes the reader nowhere expected. Sally has published six novels, all of which were reissued as classics in 2021 by Quadrant Books to critical and commercial acclaim. Of these, the bestselling 'Fire Child' and 'Heat' are dark love stories, while 'Separation' published in the States as 'Hush Little Baby' has been called a domestic thriller but is about the deep, sometimes dangerous, love between children and their parents. In all her novels danger is not far away, and the sex and love are part of that danger. Helen Dunmore wrote 'Welcome back to these dark, gripping and timeless novels' and Kate Saunders called them 'extraordinary and original'.Sally was brought up in London, lived in the States for a while, went to Oxford university and edited magazines including the literary magazine 'Books and Bookmen'. She has written fiction all her life, and a faded collection her mother gave her as a child, 'Great Short Stories of the World' is still one of her favourite books. She likes the playfulness of short stories; the way they grab the reader and tease the reader in such a short space.She writes on travel for 'The Sunday Times' and 'The Times', favouring places that challenge, and lives in north west London. Her three anthologies about birth, love and death ("New Life", 'Be Mine', 'In Loving Memory'), bring together the greatest writing on the subjects to comfort and inspire and amuse.Her stories, like her novels, are mischievous and transgressive; they have been compared to the work of Roald Dahl and Shirley Jackson.